October 05, 2007

Had to share these lines

...from p 52 page of Gilead, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Marilynne Robinson. If you haven't read it, it's just beautiful, as beautiful as anything on paper can be. The narrator is an old pastor at the end of his life and he's talking to his young son.

"I am writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you have done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to have been no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you."

As someone who wrote a whole book about what it means to be someone's child while also being someone's parent, I bow down to this.